It all turned out to be a mirage. The British tabloid newspaper Daily Mail A few weeks ago he brought out the last ace up his sleeve in the judicial battle he has against Meghan Markle. It was a star witness, Jason Knauf, a former press officer for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. She told the appeals court that Markle had asked her to review the letter she was going to send to her father, Thomas Markle, in the days before her wedding to Prince Henry. “Obviously, everything written in the draft I have done under the prevention that it could end up being leaked to the press, so I have been meticulous in choosing the words,” the Duchess of Sussex warned her assistant in an email . For the newspaper’s legal team, it was the smoking gun that definitively exposed Markle. The British courts, however, have upheld the conviction of the newspaper’s editor, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL). The content of that letter, the three magistrates of the appeal court have said, “was personal, private and did not contain matters that were of legitimate public interest.”

The battle that some tabloids have unleashed against Markle is always built, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea that the Duchess of Sussex is cunning and devious, and that nothing she does or says is innocent. The mere caution against the possibility that the letter would end up published – it was not the first time that Markle’s father expanded in the media – does not show, the duchess’s lawyers argued, that this was the ultimate purpose of the Duchess of Sussex. . It was a “deeply personal” text and it was obvious that “the intention was to keep it private,” they said before the judge.

Markle has celebrated the appeal court’s decision through a short statement: “In the almost three years since all this started, I have been patient in the face of deception, intimidation and calculated attacks,” he said. “These harmful practices are not something that happens exceptionally. They are a daily failure that divides us all, and we all deserve better than this ”, he added.

Markle’s strategy has been risky. Part of the testimony of her former aide, Knauf, corroborated the suspicions of many detractors of the duchess that she maneuvers more behind the scenes than she appears. Whoever was her communication chief assured that the Duchess gave precise instructions to her team to speak with journalists Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand, authors of the “unauthorized” book Finding Freedom. Harry and Meghan and The Making of a Modern Royal Family (Meghan and Harry. Ed. HarperCollins Ibérica released). Officially, the Dukes of Sussex had denied their collaboration in a book that told, from a favorable and partisan point of view, the story of the couple. Markle had to write to the court to apologize “for a memory failure” that had led him to forget that his team helped the two journalists to outline the details of the story. Even so, the three magistrates consider that this maneuver, “an unfortunate memory lapse,” does not undermine the fundamental legal principle upheld in the conviction, which is to protect the privacy of a daughter’s letter to her father.